Disconnectedness defines danger. Memorize the phrase. According to this story in Esquire we are about to embark a strategy that President Clinton pursued thru peaceful engagement. The article gives you a bigger picture then what’s been explained so far. I wonder how anti-globalization activists feel about this? The idea – “Disconnectedness defines danger” – rings true to me, but what of the strategy to fight it?

Tom Brokow in the NYTimes tells us that the Arab world is starting to tune in and “the fundamental structure of Middle East politics has been altered, if not over-hauled. Today, political pressure develops quickly and independently from the ground up, not just from the top down, a dramatic difference from a decade ago.” He is, of course, more then a little biased.

The same is true in weblogging. Mike Sanders says, in his great 7-Habits series, “the solution is through reading other blogs and realizing that they are a mirror into ourselves.” True of any media. But you need to have access to it in order to use it. Many webloggers act as islands of thought, only linking to sites similar to themselves. “Cyberspace is republican” according to the rule. But having easy access to alternative media changes everything. Even alternative blogs. I imagine many so-called far righties and lefties checking out the other side’s sites in private, if not in public on their sites. That is a good thing. It’s a start.

CNN, while declaring Blogging has gone mainstream, may have something when it quotes Chris Cleveland, “The way bloggers link and influence each other’s thinking could lead to a collective thought process, a kind of hive brain.”. The hive isn’t a great thought to me, but people connecting to each other across vast expanses of geography is.

Maybe the digital divide should be purposely tackled after all, but not for the simplisitic idea that it helps to fight poverty. The primary reason(s) would be to spread freedom of expression and thought with the free flow of information, education, and commerce. If “Disconnectedness defines danger”, then “Connectivity builds security”.